“I want tolet her know thoughthat all the nightssleepingbeside hereven the uselessargumentswere thingsever splendidand the hard wordsI ever feared to say can now be said:I loveyou.”

“Trappeddon't undress my loveyou might find a mannequin:don't undress the mannequin you might findmy love. she's long agoforgotten me. she's trying on a newhat and looks more the coquettethan ever.she is achildand a mannequinand death. I can't hate that. she didn't doanything unusual. I only wanted herto.”

“I was only kidding about the hundred," she says.oh," I say, "what will it cost me?"she lights her cigarette withmy lighter and looks at methrough the flame:her eyes tell me.look," I say, "I don't think Ican ever pay that price again.”

“An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.”

“I was drawn to all the wrong things: I liked to drink, I was lazy, I didn't have a god, politics, ideas, ideals. I was settled into nothingness; a kind of non-being, and I accepted it. I didn't make for an interesting person. I didn't want to be interesting, it was too hard. What I really wanted was only a soft, hazy space to live in, and to be left alone.”

“and now sometimes I'm interviewed, they want to hear aboutlife and literature and I get drunk and hold up my cross-eyed,shot, runover de-tailed cat and I say,"look, lookat this!"but they don't understand, they say something like,"yousay you've been influenced by Celine?"no," I hold the cat up,"by what happens, bythings like this, by this, by this!”

“They looked as if nothing had ever touched them--all well-mothered, protected, with a soft sheen of contentment. None of them had ever been in jail, or worked hard with their hands, or even gotten a traffic ticket. Skimmed-milk jollies, the whole bunch.”